In brief: Ford has been sponsoring a research course at the University of Michigan titled Cloud Computing in the Commute and now six university teams have developed apps for in-car use.

The word

A panel of judges from the University of Michigan, Ford, and Microsoft selected a winning entry based on relevance and usability. The winning application, called Caravan Track, will be tested in a Ford Fiesta research vehicle later this year.

The Fiesta will be road tripping to Maker Faire running a Windows 7 PC powered by Intel on Ford's "American Journey 2.0."

The coursework for the students over the 12-week research class covered how social networking and transportation apps along with newly-commonplace technologies such as voice recognition and bluetooth, will affect the vehicles of the future.

The winning entry, Caravan Track, allows clusters of vehicles traveling together to track each other along the journey while receiving text notifications of road hazards and other information along their journey.

And so ...

The winning team consisted of John Ciccone, Collin Hockey, Sang Park and Joe Phillips.

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